I’m declaring December 7th the first Sales Respect Day.

Talk to any real estate salesperson. Their job involves providing valuable information to people who need to make a decision. Yet they are treated like second-class citizens. Often they are spoken down to, their correspondence is ignored and they are very seldom thanked by the prospective purchaser. They endure jibes and constant insinuations that they have lower ethics than other people.

The fact is, every profession has a mix of people who are scrupulous and people who are not. Professions like Real Estate are probably more conscious of ethical requirements than most, because they are more regulated than other professions.

I think many business people treat the sales person with disdain because they ascribe malicious intent to people who are trying to make money out of them. As if, somehow, a profit motive offsets the right to be treated with respect. It’s the same thought pattern that instilled a hatred of money-lenders when they started charging interest. People who provide you with a service should be treated with respect. Here is the quid pro quo: I’ll give you information and act ethically. You tell me honestly where I stand and treat me with respect.

One of the greatest sins against sales people is the disingenuous mining of information by a client. They intend giving the business to a particular supplier but will seek information from a range of companies to exert price pressure on the preferred supplier. A potential supplier might spend huge amounts of time and resources answering questions, educating the client or pitching ideas. But they were never going to get the business because they were too small a company. Or in the wrong location.

So here’s how you celebrate Sales Respect Day.

1. Send a thank-you note to a sales person who has given you useful information.
2. Send a thank-you note and a small gift to a sales person who has given you useful information and didn’t get the business.
3. Send a sales person honest, constructive feedback about why they missed out on the job.

And give some thought to how you treat sales people – consider the following questions:

* Are you completely up-front with sales people about how the sales decision will be made and the chances of a sale eventuating? If you have no intention of purchasing, perhaps you should pay for the information.
* Do you reply promptly to sales people or wait for them to call you six times? Do you treat others poorly because it makes you feel more important?
* Do you have ethical guidelines as to how sales people are treated in your purchasing process?
* Do you thank sales people for comprehensive proposals that have clearly taken lots of time and effort?
* Do you waste people’s time because you have no intention of buying something off them? If you intend buying something off the Net, it’s just mean to bleed some retail sales person of information.

Most of us are sales people some of the time and purchasers some of the time. Show some respect.

Here’s a (real) complaint letter written in 2001 to Nissan.

ATTENTION: MR NEVILLE GREEN, GENERAL MANAGER – NATIONAL PARTS

DEAR SIR,

I would like to bring to your attention some serious faults in Nissan Motor Co. in regard to parts availability, lead times and pricing. Currently at this mine we have a Nissan W40 civilian bus that we cannot use to transport staff to and from the mine. The reason this bus is not operational is not labour or condition related, it is because of a denial on the part of yourself and Nissan Motor Co. to adequately supply your clientele with parts. I give you the example of the following items;

Of these I tried to purchase, only 3 are available in W.A.. It stretches the bounds of credulity that items such as wheel nuts (a consumable in most of the known world) are available with a lead time of 4 days-ex east. What resoundingly snaps the bounds of credulity clean in half is that items such as brake shoes are ex Japan (6 weeks). I cannot deny the effectiveness of these components, they not only slow the bus down, they have the ability to stop it stone fucking dead for 6 weeks! I didn’t even bother enquiring availability on such complicated parts such as washers etc – the only washers in stock would be – washer? Wind fuck out of this customer and tell him it’s ex east.

On the rare occasion we have been delivered parts within an acceptable time period, they have been entirely wrong. It is not that the wrong parts are ordered, it is that some of your parts interpreters are so green I couldn’t set them on fire with petrol.

These are not isolated incidents, they occur every time we try to purchase parts, from $10.00 hoses, at $104.94 each, through to internal gearbox components that are second only to thermonuclear warheads in their capacity to annihilate all that surrounds them.

It is astounding that in this day of interstate air and road transport at least 6 times per day, you peanuts take 4 days to get a part across the country. May I suggest you stop freighting the parts with Nissan transport vehicles as the 3 week delay in Nissan’s 24 hour roadside assist is becoming too much for us to bear.

I could elaborate further on the complete frustration I feel from trying to keep this bus on the road safely; suffice to say the bus driver now has a firm belief in the afterlife and we haven’t ruled out danger money for the position.

Please don’t get me wrong; I could handle the first 35 instances of being fucked around, (the apologetic kiss from customer support was always welcome). Now that you’ve turned it into a
bizarre form of sado-masochism complete with scratching and biting, I feel I have to complain.
I look forward to discussing every single frustrating event of the past 8 months with you.

I SINCERELY HOPE YOU CUNTS NEVER BUILD PLANES

YOURS IN UTTER AMAZEMENT,

JARROD BYRNE
UNDERGROUND MAINTENANCE PLANNER
BOUNTY GOLD MINE, MT HOLLAND FORRESTANIA, WESTERN AUSTRALIA
TEL (090) 394 527 FACSIMILE (090) 394 528
NISSAN MOTOR CO (AUSTRALIA) PTY. LTD.
C/O 244 WELSHPOOL RD, WELSHPOOL W.A.6106

AND EVERY PERSON I TALK TO BETWEEN NOW AND WHEN I GET SOME SATISFACTION

(Hate to ruin a good beat-up but the expletives were apparently added by someone after the letter was sent). In the search I did there were only 19 copies of this letter on the net including the page on Snopes verifying it. This is because the letter was written in 2001 and posted on the net in 2004.

Had the letter been written this year, it would have been Tweeted, Dugg and updated on countless Facebook sites. There would have been a public response by the company.

Consumer complaints; historically a private conversation between purchaser and corporation are going public. Companies who are not tracking conversations in social media and handling them swiftly are going to wear a lot of publicity that they don’t want. Bigger companies are more alert to this change. Small and medium-sized companies will be caught in the headlights.

I was talking to the owner of a repair business recently who said customers on the phone are sometimes very aggressive when things don’t go their own way. However, when the manufacturer is also involved in the dispute, the customer becomes surprisingly submissive. The “big company” advantage is a legacy of television advertising and financial hegemony, but that advantage is being undermined.

The recent damage to corporate credibility notably in the financial and vehicle sectors, together with the increased accountability that social media invites; we’re watching a power shift in the politics of customer relations.

Phillip, I’d like to begin by saying that I think it’s very generous of you to step down as host of Late Night Live and give voice to someone with a different set of ideas. It certainly runs counter to the traditions of incumbency; what prompted you to pass the baton? … reply

2. Who should succeed you in the job and why? … reply

3. If there was a Phillip Adams Chair at a university, what would you like it to be for? … reply

Let me ask you these questions and please feel free to say something in parenthesis.

4. If you could create a new media network, how would it be different to the existing ones? … reply

5. What is missing in the Australian psyche? … reply

6. How should we decide when to listen to experts? And how do we decide which expert(s)? … reply

7. What is the role of a normal member of society? … reply

8. Can you describe your own spirituality? If you must say ‘numinous’ that’s perfectly okay. … reply

9. What comes after the materialistic society? … reply

10. How do you translate the silent head-nodding of listeners into policy change? … reply

11. How can we better facilitate agreement? … reply

12. Other than family, one person you’d like to thank and one person you’d like to apologise to … reply

13. Is the difference between left and right the best way to separate political ideals? If not, how in future do we organise and present ideas for change? … reply

14. Do you sometimes get sick of clever people? Do you ever want to tell them to shutup and go sit in the corner? … reply

15. Is our current political system something we should stick with? Do you favour experimentation with different political models? … reply

16. What new institutions do we need? … reply

17. Apart from money, should there be another currency? … reply

18. What’s with Bea Campbell’s voice? Does it explain how we feel about the English? … reply

19. If there is no deity with a ‘grand plan’, we each get to make one up. What’s yours? … reply

Thanks Phillip; we could talk about this all night but unfortunately we’re going to have to wrap it. I commend your contributions to the listener and I ask you, Gladys, to be upstanding. A round of applause and a big koala stamp for Australia’s greatest living intellectual, the Unspeakable Phillip Adams.

Commenters are welcome to step in on Phillip’s behalf.

I’m going to speculate here that Google Wave is going to make social media even more important in web site search engine rankings. Let’s assume Google implement Wave in more or less its current form. I see four SEO benefits for social media practitioners.

As you know, comments on your blog lead to traffic and in some cases back-links which pass PageRank. In other words, they help your Google ranking.

Sometimes people comment about my blog posts in Twitter or Facebook. Which is less useful from an SEO viewpoint than commenting directly on my blog. With Wave you’ll be able to re-direct comments made on your Facebook profile to your blog. You’ll probably be able to search for and drag in Twitter threads as well. So if you have a well developed social network and a web site you’ll see an increase in your comments. Where comments are relevant to what you’re writing about, all things equal, your search engine ranking should increase relative to people who don’t use those networks. That’s benefit #1: more commenting.

It’s also the case that the more often you post the more regularly you get indexed. Which leads to higher ranking.

Successfully implemented, (and I think that’s what’s going to happen) Wave will break down the barrier between email and web applications. Your emails will become more like threaded IM conversations and you’ll be able to suck them across to your web site as content. Conventional businesses will not allow instant publishing, but once again the social media junkies will ride the wild tiger. Their email/IM conversations and their conversations on social networking sites will become easily publishable content on their blogs. Benefit #2: more content.

The logical consequence of Wave technology is that social media networks will spawn web sites with multiple authors (multiblogs). In other words a new and very fast way of creating web content, which of course can link back to the site you’re promoting. Benefit #3: link-building.

The ‘federation’ aspect of Wave gives you the ability to aggregate contacts from your different social networks. This will lead to social network expansion and benefit #4: more followers.

If you’re a black hat SEO, you have already started working out how to manipulating Waves for Search Engine Optimisation purposes. If you’re a white hat, you’ve got six months to help your clients build the size and quality of their social networks.

I wrote an uninformed blog post after reading articles reviewing Google Wave. I’ve deleted it. Herewith, I hope, a more sensible post written after viewing the Google Wave video that was shown to developers. Although the articles I read were well written I got no sense of the likely paradigm shift until I saw the video.

The lessons are:

1. Video communication is much more powerful than a good review.
2. Watch the video if you want to understand this technology.
3. Bret is a schmuck.

So Wave is an exciting technology and it will profoundly affect web communication.

It’s a new communication platform that simply and elegantly integrates email, IM and applications. But there are four significant technology shifts in the way that it works.

The organisational concepts for Waves are intuitive. Lots of stuff just happens, lots of drag and drop and lots of search functionality.

Wave won’t be live until later in the year, but developers already have access to code and the APIs. So what’s it good for? It’s an improvement in collaborative work applications and has the capacity to seriously knock around Sharepoint. It is the first improvement on MS Outlook partly because it breaks down the barrier between email and web browser. And it looks like everyone’s desktop in 2010.

Just been reading Thom Kennon and find myself in complete agreement with him.

He talks about looking for info on Google’s recent changes to trademark policy. “I first searched in Google for ‘google trademark’ and came up with a mix of old or irrelevant algo results on page one, first timely results below the fold. So I turned to Twitter and searched ‘#google trademark’ and voila — nothing but timely results with a wealth of links back to rich, hot-off-the-presses and diverse content.”

This is exactly Twitter’s strength.

Twitter has become a real-time search engine populated with human-reviewed web links (as opposed to Google which uses non-human search indexing). For contemporary matters, Twitter often produces much better results than Google.

It amazes me that Biz Stone has publicly stated Twitter will not pursue an advertising model (eg. AdWords). That is the PROVEN BUSINESS MODEL you THICKHEAD! See all that screen real estate you’re not using on a Twitter page?? That’s what it’s for! To make you MONEY. Sheesh.

Although they were bright enough to buy the leading Twitter search engine (Summize), Twitter have completely missed the boat in the way they’ve integrating it on the home page. It’s a key feature but has been buried.

Google had better hope that no-one smart buys Twitter. Despite what you might read elsewhere, it’s Google’s only serious challenger.

Went to Sexpo and met Fiona Patten, the Convenor of the Australian Sex Party. I think this is going to be successful and influential. Set up by the Eros Foundation, the sex industry lobby group, it’s attracting the support of commercial operators within the sex industry. That means they’ll have a physical distribution channel through which they can promote membership. I gave Fiona my unsolicited opinion (people love that) – I think their strategic focus should be on gaining members. This is because the mainstream parties actually have very low membership numbers. If the Sex Party get to the point where membership numbers match either of the major parties, they will legitimise themselves in people’s minds. Nobody wants to vote for a party that nobody votes for.

Their web site is already attracting 35,000 uniques a week after just six months and they are more pro-social media than the rest. Okay that’s not difficult. Join the Facebook group here.

They also need to establish in people’s minds that what they’re chasing is some representation and balance in the Parliament. Not a take-over. They need to present themselves as reasonable and normal people and they probably should consider knocking off some of the hard edges on their policies, which are pretty strongly anti-religious. That won’t help.

I wish to point out that I’ve written about this without a double entendre which seems to be beyond most media folk.

Two products at Sexpo I thought were interesting. Sportsheets are a clever product. Restrain your partner using velcro pads that adhere to the sheets. So much easier than those infernal ropes.

Party High Pills is a new business selling herbal euphorics manufactured in Hamilton Hill (in a state of the art garage?) from ingredients sourced from New Zealand and Israel. Good quality presentation; they’ve done an excellent job. Although the danger levels are almost certainly lower compared with Ecstacy and amphetamines I think they’d be wise to amp up the reassurance on their web site about toxicity testing. I’m sure there’s a substantial market there so at some point, someone needs to fund a clinical trial. Meanwhile, will instigate individual sampling for purely research purposes.

The failure of Great Southern and their competitor Timbercorp will be mourned only by their investors and their greedy financial brokers. The Managed Investment Schemes (MIS) were a blight; an awful piece of government policy that fueled uneconomic plantings and helped tip the winegrape industry into chronic oversupply.

The artificiality of a scheme offering tax advantages unavailable elsewhere was always going to cause problems Everyone in the agriculture industry knows that a return on investment of 20%+ is extraordinary in these times. Yet MIS schemes were in the market projecting 25% plus for investors. Overlay substantial management fees, extravagant in some cases and ridiculous commissions for financial brokers; it just did not stack up. The Australian today covered the increases in executive salaries months before the collapse. I am so surprised.

Investors were either completely taken in or were 100% in it for the tax benefit. Why was the government in such a hurry to hasten plantings? They just distorted the economics of the agricultural industry and handed huge sums of money to rapacious and unscrupulous entrepreneurs. Who lobbied the government to implement these tax breaks? Now that these ill-conceived schemes have been exposed, there should be a parliamentary inquiry into how this all came about.

Pictured are John Young, who ‘earned’ a $2 million retirement bonus from the company last year, and Peter Mansell, a Great Southern non-executive director and former Chairman of West Australian Newspapers.

An excellent story from Radio National’s Law Report on the implications of the High Court judgment on Ice TV vs Nine Network. It was resolved in IceTV’s favour, to wit, no copyright exists in published TV programme guides. There’s a big knock-on effect.

The judgment says in part: (I was going to say ‘inter alia’. Would you have been impressed?)

There must be “creative spark” or exercise of “skill and judgment” before a work is sufficiently “original” for the subsistence of copyright.

My reading of this is that apart from television programme guides, telephone books (possibly even Yellow Pages), football fixtures and music charts based on sales numbers will also lose copyright protection. Of course, the owners of the “intellectual property” may challenge your attempts to commercialise what they see as theirs. However, it seems from the judgment that you’d win once you got to the High Court. You do have a legal budget don’t you?

In time, perhaps not very much time, third parties will re-purpose the White Pages and probably also the Yellow Pages as online databases.

White Pages (Telstra) and Yellow Pages (Sensis) limit the functionality of their online versions. They don’t let you output to text files that could be imported to spreadsheets or databases. Your queries output to a web page and you have to strip out what you’re interested in.

If a third party scanned all the Yellow Pages ads they could collect and publish the web addresses and contact details of all those businesses. At the moment businesses need to pay through the nose if they want click-throughs to their web site or email. Third parties could index all the copy in the Yellow Pages and allow searching by keyword. Take the restaurant category. You could search for street name, ‘B.Y.O.’, ‘alfresco’ or ‘gold plate’. This would immediately be more useful than Yellow Pages, which limits the search criteria to pre-determined fields. Doesn’t make any Sensis.

Third parties would introduce a White Pages reverse look-up, an ability to identify people who’ve moved house in the last twelve months (by comparing old and new books) and the sub-set of businesses big enough to take out bold and super-bold entries. They’ll be looking for opportunities to add value to the core information.

I think Sensis and White Pages still define themselves largely as books rather than databases. Yellow Pages revenue is under pressure. For Pete’s sake; it’s published once a year, it contains no product or price information and it offers a paltry number of low resolution pictures on crap-quality paper.

Now add in this decision, which may well open them up to even more online competition. The High Court has said data is just data. Information wants to be free.

- Further discussion of the legal implications: DLA Phillips Fox

- David Richards notes the lack of coverage of the judgment by Nine’s print media.

Perth, where I live, has a superb climate. Everyone who lives here knows it. To my mind, April is the most magnificent month of the year and this year, April weather has extended into May. Ridiculous amounts of mild/warm weather and blue skies.

It’s commonly held in marketing circles that the WA Tourism Association is not the sharpest axe on the block. If I were them, I would be talking up the climate of the place and encouraging the reporting of cloud statistics, which reflect well on our fair city. To help them out, I’ve constructed a prototype here (generous, I know). Cloud cover is normally measured in okta. Zero means cloudless, one means a trace of cloud, two means a clear day, six means a cloudy day and eight means complete cloud cover. I’ve constructed the Complementary Okta Scale which allows you to measure blue sky. 8/8 = solid blue sky. 0/8 = no blue sky. So here are the last 39 days:

The stats across the 39 days average out to a number that the Bureau of Meteorology define as a “clear” day. There were 4 days that individually would fit the category of a “cloudy” day. Not hard to cope with, since these days were all 25 degree-ish. You could always stay indoors.

To pick a completely random basis for comparison, here is the Melbourne data over the same period:

Here’s the Perth maximum temp over the last 38 days; maxima overwhelmingly between 25 and 30 degrees Celcius (77 and 86 Fahrenheit).

Minimum temps: between 10 and 16 degrees (50 and 59 Fahrenheit)

Wind averages 10.5 kph (6.5 mph). I think the official classification is ‘pleasant’. And relative humidity averages 46%, officially, ‘very bloody pleasant’. Okay, maybe not official.

Rain – only 5mm on the 14th April. We all took the day off.